Matilda Ziegler Magazine for the Blind

While video games aren’t brought up here very often, this article was just too good to not write on. 

Recently, Jordan Verner, a blind teenager who is a fan of the Legend of Zelda video game, posted some videos of him completing parts of the game on youtube.  At first it was just for fun, but it did gain the attention of a decent amount of people in the gaming community.  So he decided to start asking for tips on how to beat the game.  Initially, he wasn’t expecting much from the people who had found his videos, nor did he expect that their help would be able to assist him through the game.

However, another gamer that he had met online made it his mission to help Jordan through the complex levels of the game.  By using Skype, an internet-based communication tool that enables people to talk and see each other online, Roy Williams and three other gamers were able to help Jordan out.  The four gamers would play different sections of the complex three-dimensional game, recording every necessary move to navigate through every piece of every level.  Then, they would send it to Jordan in a word document and his computer would read him the detailed instructions, acting as a perfect guide for him to move through the game.

While the average gamer is said to be able to complete the game in about two weeks, it took Jordan and his online gamer companions nearly two years to get him to the end of the game.  All of the instructions given to him totaled roughly one hundred thousand keystrokes.

When he finally reached the end, Jordan was elated.  “It felt great,” he said.  “I felt strong, I felt like the sky’s the limit.  Our school’s motto–and I live by it–is the impossible is only the untried.”

There’s no word on what Jordan’s next gaming conquest will be, but he now has people that are willing to help him and a great attitude to achieve his goal.

To read the original article, please go to http://www.geekologie.com/2010/03/brings_a_tear_to_my_eye_three.php

Seventeen year old Chelsea King has been in the news ever since her disappearance in a California park roughly one week ago.  Now, police have discovered a body buried in a shallow grave that they believe is hers.  They have held a man named John Gardner as a suspect in the case since only a few days after she went missing.  Prosecutors are now planning on filing official charges against him.

What makes this case so frustrating is that John Gardner is a convicted sex offender.  In 2000, he was charged with beating and molesting a 13 year old girl.  For that crime, he served 5 years of his 6 year sentence and was put on parole until 2008.  A psychiatrist who analyzed Gardner warned prosecutors that he was and would continue to be a danger to underage girls.  Gardner was also positively identified by a girl as the man who ambushed and almost raped her back in December in the same park where Chelsea King disappeared.  She elbowed him in the face and was able to get away.  Police are also investigating whether or not he is connected to the disappearance of another California teenager who went missing roughly a year ago.

Normally, this type of article is something I would choose to leave out of the magazine because it is being covered by nearly every news outlet in the country and is, unfortunately, a very sad tale for one California family who lost their child.  However, I feel that it’s necessary to ask this question: Why was this allowed to happen?  The man, convicted of a crime against an underage girl in 2000, was given the minimum sentence.  Despite all of the testimony from a psychiatrist specializing in criminal profiling who claimed that he would still be a danger to society, he was allowed to be released on parole one year early.  Afterwards, unbeknownst to his parole officer, he spent most of his time at his mother’s house, located within terribly close proximity to an elementary school.  Since his release, he is now connected to at least two crimes against underage girls and possibly a third, two of which are murders.  I ask again, why was this allowed to happen?  Every possible warning sign was given by experts put in place to advise on these matters.  Yet, he was allowed back into the public domain.  Failing that, how is there not a system put in place to monitor people who have been deemed “high risk?”  It feels like multiple agencies really dropped the ball on this one, and it’s a tragedy that a girl had to pay for it with her life. 

I’m not expecting that the systems put in place regarding sex offenders will be perfect, but serious flaws like this need to be fixed.  Right now, it seems like all there is protecting us from them is a screen that’s spread large enough for the bugs to still get through.

Aside from the millions of American Toyota owners who have had to deal with the massive recall from the Japanese automaker, there are also some interesting things happening on the side as a result.  One man is hoping that it will get him out of prison.

Koua Fong Lee was driving home from church in 2006 with his pregnant wife, daughter, father, brother, and niece when he claims that his car, a 1996 Toyota Camry, suddenly accelerated without his control, causing him to strike two vehicles and kill three people. 

He claimed that he was pumping the breaks as he approached the intersection at between 70 and 90 miles per hour.  The prosecutors disagreed, saying that his foot was on the gas as he came up to the red light.  The mechanics who investigated the car testified that the brakes and the engine were fine at the time of the attack.  Though, they did note that the throttle was set at 15 percent open, which was odd.  They dismissed the throttle position as something that resulted from the crash.  Lee was charged with vehicular homicide and sentenced to eight years in prison.

Lee’s 1996 Camry is not part of any existing recall, but that doesn’t mean that there weren’t other similar problems reported with that model.  According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration complaint database, there have been 526 incidents reported for the 1996 Toyota Camry.  Roughly two dozen of them were related to vehicle speed control.  In one incident, a woman claimed that when she was driving at 65 miles per hour on the highway, she pressed the brake to slow down but the car accelerated on its own instead.  Only by aggressively pumping the brakes was she able to pull the car over to a stop.  Another incident involved a woman stopped at an intersection.  Her car suddenly lurched forward into traffic, causing an accident with a motorcycle that resulted in the death of the rider later on.

What’s more interesting about this case is that the families of the victims of Lee’s crash are on his side.  They say that they want the truth to be revealed and that they don’t feel that Lee was responsible for the accident, citing that his whole family was in the car with him at the time and it wouldn’t make any sense.

 To read the original article, please go to   http://http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/03/02/toyota.recall.appeal/?hpt=C2

While the deadly earthquake that rocked Chile on February 27 absolutely moved the Earth around quite a bit, the powerful shaker also knocked our planet off of its axis and shortened our day.

According to a NASA scientist, the Earth’s axis was altered by roughly 3 inches. A short search on the internet revealed that the Earth weighs an estimated 13 septillion pounds. That’s a 13 with 24 zeros after it. So, while in the grand scheme of things 3 inches may seem very small, that’s one big boulder to be tilting over.

However, while the Earth is a huge rock to be moving, this quake was nothing to scoff at. With a magnitude of 8.8 on the Richter scale, it produced roughly 67 exajoules of energy. As a basis of comparison, if the United States could have harnessed that energy, it would power the entire country for over four and a half years. The violent event was also equivalent to the explosion of 15.8 gigatons of TNT, a blast roughly 316 times more powerful than the largest nuclear explosion in history. In short, it was rather large and shook Chile quite a bit.

As was mentioned before, this quake also shortened our day. While it is probably impossible to perceive, our day is now 1.26 microseconds shorter. It’s a measurement of time that not even the Olympic judges would pay attention to. But again, keep in mind that the Earth is a pretty large object to be jostling this much. This effect, called the “ice skater effect,” is due to the massive amount of rock being moved, which changes the overall mass distribution of Earth, and thus the way it spins. They call it the ice skater effect because if you watch a figure skater spin, they rotate faster as they bring their arms closer to their body and change the distribution of their mass.

Other effects of the earthquake may be more perceivable. Santa Maria Island of the coast of the Chilean city of Concepcion may have lifted as much as 6 feet, and the resulting tsunami that swept across the Pacific has hit the Hawaiian Islands some 6,500 miles away and forced Japan to issue its own warnings another 4,100 miles away.

The current death toll sits at about 720 people, but as many as two million are displaced from their homes in the country that’s been rattled to its core.

To read the original article, please go to

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-03-01/chilean-quake-likely-shifted-earth-s-axis-nasa-scientist-says.html

Various numbers were acquired using calculations from www.wolframalpha.com

An Ohio man, frustrated about the bank foreclosing on his home, decided that the best course of action would be to never let them have the satisfaction of accomplishing that.  Terry Hoskins reportedly owed $160,000 on his $350,000 home and when he was alerted that he would be losing it to the bank, he bulldozed the house to the ground.

The problems started when the IRS placed liens on his carpet business after his brother, a partner in the business at one time, sued him.  The bank then considered his house as collateral and eventually went after both of his properties. 

Hoskins said that he was even offered $170,000 from someone willing to buy the house, but the bank refused, claiming that they could get more than that if they foreclosed and sold it themselves.  It was after that when Hoskins gave the bank his official warning, “I’ll tear it down before I let you take it.”  He said that he planned on giving the bank exactly what they deserved, the hill the house laid on.  As far as the house itself, he says, “I brought it out of the ground and I plan on putting it back in the ground.”

Hoskins business is going up for auction this week and he says that he plans on possibly leveling that as well.

His fight against the bank is certainly unconventional, but it has garnered support from people all across the country who can sympathize with his situation.  He hopes that his actions will make other banks think twice before doing the same thing to someone else.  While he knows that legal troubles are most certainly coming his way, he has no regrets, knowing in his heart that what he did was the right thing for him.

To read the original article, please go to http://www.wlwt.com/news/22600154/detail.html

While it’s doubtful that the Amish business owner was updating his location on Facebook via his mobile telephone, his shed business was being routinely broken into nonetheless. After the sixth break in, the man decided he’d had enough and went to discover a solution to his problem.

The man came to the conclusion that the best way to catch the criminal was to catch him in the act with a security camera. While Amish law forbids them to be photographed, it doesn’t say anything about taking someone else’s picture, the man said. By using an infrared hunting camera, normally reserved for taking pictures on animals at night, he was able to catch a perfect glimpse of the criminal breaking in for a seventh time.

Other Amish business owners in the area had also been reporting break ins at their stores and are now planning to fight back in the same way. One man now has a video camera hidden in some horse harnesses in an attempt to stop the criminal. His store has been broken into 4 times.

Police say that the video they’ve reviewed already shows the criminal coming in and going through drawers looking for loose cash. A picture of him is up on the website accompanying the article and police are asking that anyone with any information on the individual please come forward.

To read the original article, please go to

 http://www.wgal.com/news/22632753/detail.html

Many people today are involved in some sort of social networking on the internet. They use MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter, among others, to keep in touch with friends and family, share pictures, and communicate with the world in general. But aside from the fact that they are essentially eliminating their own privacy, they might be risking more than they think, and their home owner’s insurance, of all things, may increase because of that.

Why home owner’s insurance you ask? Well, with new updates to these social media websites, as well as the dawn of smart mobile telephones that can access them, people are now able to post where they are and what they’re doing remotely. They can even do something called geo tagging, where they use the GPS chip in their phone to post their exact location on a virtual map. The problem arises when this information is uploaded to the site for anyone to see, thus alerting anyone able to view that information that you are not at home but you’re actually, “Getting a foot long sub from the deli,” or “Wow, the post office is so slow!” Any criminal smart enough to access this information can stake out the person who routinely posts what they’re doing when not in their home. That person inevitably leaves themselves completely open to burglary, and insurance companies may start monitoring this information as well to cover themselves should anything happen to the house when the owner is out.

While it seems like a crazy premise, it makes sense that the insurance companies would seek to protect themselves from their own policy holders who choose to act irresponsibly and eliminate their own privacy so nonchalantly. For those who continue to post their business on these sites while away from home, they’d better learn how to modify their privacy settings so that they can control who sees the information they upload or else they might come home one day to find a few broken windows, property missing, and an insurance company with a copy of their facebook updates tucked into folded arms.

To read the original article, please go to

 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/22/facebook-twitter-users-co_n_471548.html

Animals are often used to comfort people when they’re sick or injured, but now they are being incorporated into courtrooms as well so that they can relax those giving testimony who have been victims of violent crimes.  Some of the subjects covered in testimony of violent crimes can be especially hard for people to revisit and by allowing them to sit with an animal trained to comfort them it makes the process much easier and, more importantly, allows them to give a better statement.

The dogs used in the courtrooms go through a rigorous training school at the Canine Companions for Independence school in Santa Rosa, California.  The school has trained 300 dogs, seven of which are now being used in courtrooms.  The training school trains dogs to help people with a number of disabilities, including blindness. In some cases, the dog is just not meant to help certain people and so they need to undergo a “career change.”  For example, one dog was being trained to assist the blind, but they could get it to stop pulling on the leash, an act that could be detrimental in the future.  So, they transitioned that dog into the courtroom program and it now serves to help people in a different fashion.

The dogs have shown to be especially helpful when children who have witnessed or been victims of domestic abuse enter a courtroom.  They act as a non-judgmental and soothing presence for the children and allow them to speak about the incident without being nervous or uncomfortable in such an exposed setting.

Using dogs in a courtroom has been so successful that the practice is now expanding across the country and there are multiple organizations who donate money to train the dogs who will be used to comfort those who have suffered from violence. 

To read the original article, please go to http://content.usatoday.net/dist/custom/gci/InsidePage.aspx?cId=ozarksnow&sParam=37631128.story

For the most part, as citizens, we trust the judgment of police officers who have sworn to protect us.  However, this story out of the United Kingdom is sure to make even the most trusting people a little uneasy.

As part of a new program aimed at encouraging citizens to protect themselves from burglary, police in Macclesfield, Cheshire are going to begin walking around neighborhoods at night testing windows and doors to see if they’re open.  What’s more surprising is that if the officers find that they can gain access to the home, they have been ordered to enter and wake the sleeping residents to give them a lecture about how they had left their house open to be broken into. 

While on the surface it’s an unconventional effort to protect citizens in the area, this could also turn out to be very dangerous for both the residents whose homes are being broken into and the police who are breaking in.  An inspector who will be a part of this particularly strange community outreach program said he expects most reasonable people to thank them for encouraging citizens to improve the safety of their home.  Though, I can’t imagine any thanks coming their way without first being barraged with frightful screams and stern threats from the people who were ousted from their peaceful slumber after police officers broke into their home unannounced.  I wouldn’t be surprised if more than just a few police officers tumble through a kitchen window only to find a butcher’s knife pointed their way when they startled someone who was getting a midnight glass of water.

Now that I have been trying to see things from the blind community’s perspective, this situation seems even more terrifying.  How would a blind person know if the person who came into their home was really a police officer, and would they be held responsible if they defended themselves in turn, possibly injuring the unwelcomed guest?

I find myself at once admiring the police force for their intentions and shaking my head due to their planned execution of those intentions.  I have a feeling that this will backfire terribly, and I hope that if and when it does, nobody gets hurt.

To read the original article, please go to  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1250174/Police-pose-burglars-bid-cut-break-ins.html

On February 10, an earthquake measuring 3.8 on the richter scale shook citizens out of their sleep at 4 in the morning.  The quake was centered near Virgil, Illinois, roughly 50 miles from Chicago.

Many people reported that it sounded like a train was going right past their house and furniture and lights were shaking violently.  Sarah Evans, owner of a public relations firm, woke to find nearly every inch of her 100 year old house vibrating.  Once the quake had stopped, she got out of bed and put an update on Twitter seeing if anyone would respond and corroborate her story about the uncommon earth-rattling event.  Soon after she posted on Twitter, multiple comments had come in confirming that others had been shook awake to experience the world convulsing around them.

Local emergency authorities reported that the switchboards had lit up after the event, but that no extensive damage was caused and most people had just been rustled out of sleep and were confused and afraid.

Representatives of the U.S Geological Survey commented that the quake was felt as far away as southern Wisconsin.  They also said that while they’re unsure which fault line was responsible, there are many that run all over the world that could realistically slip at any moment.

To read the original article, please go to http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/11/us/11chicago.html